Matthew Bourne studied an MA in Fine Art at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990 – 1992 and now lives in Derbyshire. His work is derived from and inspired by sight, sound and emotion from the real world and his belief that painting is a timeless, emotive and transcendental means of expression.

“I believe the process of painting is integral to its content and the quality of foremost importance. I aim to set up a tension in my paintings between spontaneity and risk and more measured controlled approach. Within this approach I strive to create paintings that have the right balance in mood, light, texture, brushwork, placement,incident and structure.

To flick, smudge, pour, spray, spread, rub, splat, squeeze, draw, drag, scribble and dribble in order to create tough, uncompromising paintings which carry the weight of art history and relate to people on many levels. I hope my painting will keep evolving. Exactly where it is hard to say because so much comes from within the painting. Perhaps I will see something or some accident happen which will send me in a new direction.”

At the moment in i2Art Gallery (Saffron Walden), we have a feature of Loukas Morely‘s work.

Loukas Morley is an artist specialising in the media of collage, bricolage, gestural drawings and paintings. His responses to feelings and thoughts are intuitive, so that when an idea has become firm in his mind he is able to step aside and let it describe itself. This is what gives his work its momentum: respecting the flow of an idea and allowing it to breathe on its own.

Morley takes seemingly peripheral objects and makes them central by allowing them to inhabit a setting which lets us see them freshly and with an affection which is poignant because it is so unexpected. For example, he takes a squashed shopping basket found abandoned, places it in a gallery, takes a photograph of it and then takes the image and makes it into a screen print. The basket is dignified through the process it undergoes and the attention it receives.

Morley is spare and precise in his work. The stark simplicity of the marks and lines of his pieces provide piercingly humane responses to the inescapable problem of wastefulness peculiar to humankind: these trigger in us our own rich and luxurious poems. Here is an artist whose work is always elegantly robust; whose pieces resonate with that quality which no human being should ever have to live without – beauty.